Resistance (28 page)

It was in this state that Boylan found him. The lawyer was sporting a large sticking plaster over a wound on his forehead, but he’d found himself a fresh suit from somewhere, and seemed to have located a barber to judge by his new haircut and pink, freshly shaved jowls. He did not have much hair, but what he did have he’d spent a hundred bucks on, to Dave’s eye.

‘Dave,’ he called out, ‘Dave! At last. I have been looking for you all over. Come along, come along. We have work to do.’

A terrible weariness came over Dave as the hot zephyr of his anger guttered and died away.

‘Oh man, X, not now. Really, not now.’

But Boylan would not be denied. ‘Yes now, Dave. Yes, very definitely now. Come along, I’ve got the girl’s family locked in for a live cross from their lounge room and a van with an outside broadcast unit for your piece to studio.’

He looked like the Energizer Bunny he was bouncing around so much.

‘What? They want to ask me how I got a bunch of guys killed?’

His eyes narrowed as he pondered the hyperactive figure capering around in front of him. But before he could say anything, before he could lay the blame for what had happened on someone else, Boylan surprised him.

‘No! Of course not. A tragedy, Dave. A terrible tragedy. But unavoidable. You rescued the ones who needed rescuing. Professor Compton? He’s not a civilian. He’s a government operative, a trained operator, a top agent of a secret bureau. And the war band which took him carried him off with a squad of Navy SEALs, some of them still armed. If they couldn’t look after themselves, who were you to do so? You were the man who rescued the pretty waitress from the Cracker Barrel, that’s who! And who risked his life, in vain, it sadly,
sadly
transpires, for her pretty friend. Come along now, Dave. Let’s get ahead of this. Those MSNBC fools have only just started in on this crusade. We’ll crush them, Dave. Crush them like bugs. But we have to move now!’

So he moved.

24

The Chinese uncorked the first nuke shortly after Boylan and Hooper hitched a ride on another business jet, this time comped by Warren Buffett as a thank you for saving his home town and Darla Jean Murnane, the waitress from the Cracker Barrel, where he was wont to stop in for mac and meatloaf when he was done piling up money for the working day. The jet, like the last one, had a fighter escort, but not one organised by Compton, of course. Boylan claimed responsibility and credit for all the arrangements, and Dave was happy to leave him to it. The lawyer started using the inflight WiFi to mainline newsfeeds as soon as he’d strapped himself in. At first he just needed to stay on top of the story in Omaha, specifically the story he was trying to spike; the one in which Dave got a bunch of Navy SEALs killed by being an irresponsible jerk. That difficulty lasted all of twenty-five minutes, until the interview with Darla Jean Murnane’s family was released into the wild. Their heartfelt blubbering thanks to Super Dave for rescuing their little girl, and Dave’s aw-shucks t’weren’t-nothin’-really response killed the spin that he was somehow to blame for the other rescue mission going wrong. The last gasp of oxygen rushed out of that story when footage surfaced of Dave’s heroics on the bridge and in the field where he caught up with the Grymm war band.

It wasn’t grainy, highly controlled military video. A camera crew freelancing for
Ghost Hunters
had avoided the media exclusion zone by the happy accident of already being inside it, filming a special on a haunted farmhouse when the barriers went up. By another happy accident the production company which owned the
Ghost Hunters
franchise was a sometime client of attorney-at-law Professor X Boylan Esquire. The farmhouse turned out not to be haunted at all, which was disappointing, but in a third, almost unbelievably fortunate accident, it was situated so as to give the crew ready access to the Platte River Bridge, the makeshift military base on the I-80, and by a stroke of luck which really did have nothing to do with the machinations of one X Boylan, Esq., the field in which Dave performed his rescue.

The freelancers, who were already being spoken of for Pulitzer nominations, produced a slick, professionally edited video package, with a hard rockin’ background track by AC/DC (‘Highway to Hell’ as Dave carried Heath away from the Djinn in super slow motion, and ‘Back in Black’ as he kicked ass while rescuing Emmeline and Darla Jean). It ran wall-to-wall across all the major networks and cable news outlets after upload to YouTube, where it racked up seven and a half million views in less than an hour.

The
Ghost Hunters
crew only caught the tail end of his all-in brawl with the Grymm and Sliveen and he wasn’t much more than a blur on the screen. But everywhere that blur went, monsters exploded, and by the time the captain had turned off the seatbelt sign, and the flight attendant (a dude, unfortunately) had served Dave his first brew, he was a superhero again.

‘They love you, Dave,’ Boylan cried out across the aisle, waving a half-empty champagne flute around for a top-up. He had two laptops open now, and an iPad, and he was watching another screen deployed from the cabin ceiling. ‘Oh I love this bit,’ he said as Dave appeared in a pop-up window on the big screen to tell the country that they could rest easy knowing the United States military was on the job.

‘That doesn’t really sound like something I’d say, X,’ said Dave, who was starting to feel a little guilty about lighting out on Heath and the others. He was also feeling bad because he could sense himself being lifted up onto the shoulders of hundreds of millions of Americans and cheered out of the stadium for rescuing Emmeline and Carla May or Darla Jean or whatever her name was. But he hadn’t been in time to save that other girl. If he’d gone even a minute or two earlier perhaps she could have had a happy story too.

‘Pfft!’

Boylan had no time for such nonsense.

‘You have to say things like that, Dave. It’s part of the script. Remember, you’re working from a script now. It might feel wrong, but it scans a hell of a lot better. And if our resident paranoid Captain Heath is even halfway right about keeping the powers that be on side, that’s exactly the sort of anaesthetic they’re going to want you feeding to the ignorant masses. Not that I’m against the ignorant masses, Dave. In a mass consumption economy, the ignorant masses are the very engine of a life well lived by me and thee, my friend. God bless them. God bless them one and all.’

He slopped some more champagne around.

Dave thanked the flight attendant as his dinner was delivered, although maybe it was an early breakfast now since the sun was already coming up. A carpetbagger steak with baked potatoes and steamed broccoli, a concession to Zach Allen and his dietary scolding.

‘Holy crap would you look at this,’ cried Boylan, newly excited by something he’d seen on one of his laptops. ‘The Chinese have nuked a whole army of monsters that boiled up out of the earth near the Three Gorges. That’s just marvellous.’

‘Doesn’t say what sect they were?’ Dave asked around his first baked tater.

‘Sect?’

‘Sort of like a nation of monsters.’

‘How would they know?’ Boylan shrugged as he sipped at his refilled champagne glass. ‘I don’t think they bothered asking. They just decided to play atomic whack-a-mole. Told everybody about it too, which isn’t like them at all.’

As Dave ate his breakfast-dinner and drank his breakfast-dinner beer, some extra heavy lager brewed by lesbian nuns or something, Boylan fed him titbits of news from around the world. Nobody was criticising the Chinese for dropping the bomb, in fact a couple of undeclared nuclear powers had declared they’d be doing the exact same damn thing if it came down to that. The United States Air Force had shot down another four dragons. The RAF had accounted for eight. And the North Korean regime was claiming a hundred ‘fire-breathing criminal monster lizards’ now lay scattered in smoking kebab chunks all over the People’s Democratic Republic. But that claim remained unconfirmed.

In Russia, the armed forces had been mobilised and placed ‘on the highest alert’, but they were withdrawing from the country’s massive borders and redeploying to population centres.

‘And listen to this, Dave,’ said Boylan, whose giddy, childlike glee grew giddier with every story that he read. ‘Details are emerging of a pitched battle between humans and monsters in the town of Fester, down in Georgia, and it didn’t go well for the monsters.’

‘Buttecrack,’ said Dave, finally grinning for the first time in hours.

‘I’m sorry, Dave?’

‘Beau-cray, sorry,’ he said. ‘Fester is the seat of Buttecrack County in Georgia. Knoxy told me about that, you know, the orcs coming up there. Except it wasn’t a real story then.’

‘Well it’s a real story now, Dave, and the heroes are citing you and the defence of New Orleans as an inspiration to them.’ He waved his champagne at the laptops, slopping more fizz over the rim. ‘Oh, what does it matter? Even Apple will be comping us freebies by close of business, Dave. We’re riding a wave here, my friend. A tsunami of opportunity.’

Boylan’s energy seemed almost frenzied. Dave supposed it was a reaction to living through the massacre and aftermath at the restaurant. He couldn’t blame the guy for getting high on life, although he couldn’t share the feeling. He kept seeing images of that poor girl, the other waitress, whose name he couldn’t even remember. Kept seeing her body tossed about like a rag doll.

He forced the visions from his mind, the way he was learning to tamp down on Urgon’s memories that came seeping up behind his eyeballs when he didn’t much feel like seeing them. Another couple of lesbian beers, another steak, a whole bowl of baked potatoes slathered in some sort of blue cheese sauce, and he found himself drifting off to sleep.

*

Dave awoke on descent into Los Angeles and when they landed at a private area of LAX, he was refreshed and relaxed after a short nap and a second breakfast. A proper breakfast this time, with scrambled eggs and German bacon, and thick, glistening pork sausages and crispy hash browns and grilled mushrooms and coffee with cream. And to finish, he had a blueberry and banana muffin (his favourite kind), baked especially on the say-so of Mr Buffett, by Chef Donna of Sweet Magnolias, certainly the finest bakery in all of Omaha, and quite possibly the whole Midwest.

‘Damn fine muffin, X,’ said Dave, who was feeling less guilty with every passing minute, and every new report of his awesomeness and the surprising stupidity of the various Sects in presenting themselves for systematic destruction all over the world. They were proving to be like Dark Ages barbarians who drew themselves up into huge fighting squares to shake their spears and shields at the Imperial Death Star hanging low in the sky above them.

‘The finest,’ Boylan confirmed. ‘I am nothing if not diligent in pursuit of your interests, Dave. And today your interests were best pursued, in my professional judgment as your attorney and advisor, by securing that muffin. But as your advisor, I must now advise you that the muffin, while excellent, is not the highlight of this day. I do not wish to disappoint in this, Dave, but rest assured I will always give you the hard news. And Dave, the joy you knew while eating that muffin will be as nothing compared to the girlish
squee
I feel compelled to utter upon telling you that we have lunch with Mr Brad Pitt and Mr Zack Snyder and a small team of contract lawyers who will not actually be eating with us, but will be passing around papers before the appetisers arrive, that we might conclude our business, that business being the option Mr Pitt has agreed to purchase on
Dave Hooper Saves the World
. A working title, but I like it. I like it a lot.’

Boylan dragged in a mouthful of air, having forgotten to breathe while speaking.

‘Squee,’ he added dryly.

And so lunch like champions they did, and the contracts were signed for
Dave Hooper Saves the World
, which was a working title, but Dave liked it almost as much as Boylan. Brad Pitt was kind of cool, and Zack Snyder was very funny, and promised to get signed copies of that
300
comic for Dave’s boys. And Dave congratulated himself on having such a Super Dad moment as he swapped parenting tips with Brad Pitt, and then Bruce Willis stopped by the table and joked that he should totally play Dave, because Pitt was too scrawny and worn out from changing diapers. And later Boylan checked them into a very nice hotel, and Dave met Jennifer Aniston for a drink, as Dave had wanted, and she was very hot, as he had always thought, and she found him very funny and charming and even intriguing. She was thinking about not going home to learn her lines for some movie she was doing, and he didn’t much care that she was totally drunk on his overproof pheromones because
. . .
Jennifer Fucking Aniston!

He did have a brief, sad moment when he wanted to call Marty and Vince and tell them he was having a drink with
Jennifer Fucking Aniston!
But then he remembered that Marty was dead, eaten like a big meat popsicle by Urgon. And Vince
. . .
well he wasn’t quite sure where Vince was. He hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since losing track of the other survivors at the marines’ secret base where he’d found out he’d turned into a Marvel character.

But another pitcher of martinis with Jen – yeah, she was Jen now – and then all of a sudden he was shaking hands with Matt Damon and some guys from Google, or maybe Facebook, and Jay Z was backslapping him. Alex Rodriguez appeared from somewhere and a party kicked off, and he was doing lines, and tequila lay-backs, and everyone was cheering and he was aware in a distant way that this party went on forever, all over the world. He did some more lines, and people everywhere were celebrating this bizarre thing that had happened. Dark magic and monsters had come back into the world and the human race had totally kicked their fucking asses! So Dave dropped some acid, which was a pleasant buzz that he felt as a tactile colour, but only for a few minutes. And he knew, because people kept telling him all night long, that he was the reason for it all, for the big, warm hug the whole world was giving itself right then, or part of the reason for it, because he’d dropped some ecstasy, or something, and he’d shown people they could stand up for themselves. And by God they’d done it. In Omaha, and New Orleans, and Fester, and China, and England and somewhere in the Middle East according to the last news report he’d seen on a TV over some bar. But fuck, you know what that place was like – they’d killed the orcs and gone straight back to killing each other – and maybe something happened in Japan too. Or Korea. Might have been Korea.

But what the hell did it matter?

For a few days there
everyone
had been scared, even if they weren’t saying so. Scared in a way people hadn’t been since they hid in caves from things that growled and fed in the night. And then they weren’t scared anymore and they crawled out of the cave with a burning stick and started to reshape the world, and Dave did a line, and he did another line, because the monsters were gone. And then Jennifer Aniston was gone too, but it didn’t matter because he looked down and found Paris Hilton on his arm and then Paris Hilton was at his side and giggling and stroking his chest as he fumbled for room keys and discovered that he was actually a little drunk, which was awesome, and maybe even a little fucked up after doing a heap of lines and some pills, and then they spilled through the door and he ripped off his shirt and someone said, ‘I’m afraid you’re going to need another shirt.’ And Paris went ‘Huh?’ and Agent Trinder smiled at him.